Dell PowerFlex R660
Unbounded Software-Defined Infrastructure for the Modern Datacenters

Overview:

Dell PowerFlex software-defined infrastructure is a comprehensive, adaptable, and reliable solution that helps businesses modernize their IT infrastructure, increase agility, and meet the demands of modern workloads. With its exceptional performance, scale, and ability to consolidate diverse workloads, PowerFlex instills confidence in your infrastructure to securely deliver under extreme requirements and enables businesses to remain competitive and respond quickly to changing conditions.

Uncompromising performance and density for data center productivity and scale

The PowerEdge R660 is the ideal dual-socket platform for dense scale-out data center computing and storage. Benefit from the flexibility of 2.5” or 3.5” drives, the performance of NVMe and embedded intelligence to ensure optimized application performance in a secure platform. With embedded diagnostics and SupportAssist, the R660 delivers maximum uptime in a worry-free environment.

Ideal workloads:

• Dense software-defined storage
• Service providers: application tier
• Dense private cloud
• Virtualization
• HPC

Maximum Flexibility

Achieve extreme business agility, exceptional performance, and scale, and consolidate diverse workloads with Dell PowerFlex

A Unified, Modern platform

Software-defined approaches provide compelling choices to deliver this organizational agility. It allows organizations to automate, hence ensuring application requirements are automatically met. Additionally, ease in management allows organizations to utilize personnel efficiently. Also, they combine industrystandard hardware with software to pool and manage resources, thereby optimizing resource allocation. When selecting a software-defined platform, there are some critical aspects to consider:

• The platform must support diverse workload needs such as multiple operating systems, hypervisors and container orchestration platforms, as well as distinct scaling needs and specific data services.
• It must enhance simplicity and agility of the environment by adopting standards and automation.
• It must deliver stringent SLAs predictably and do so at scale. It also must be able to offer enterprise reliability, security, and critical data services.

PowerFlex: An unbounded adaptable Software-Defined Infrastructure

Dell PowerFlex, a software-defined infrastructure, provides a solid foundation for the customers for their IT infrastructure modernization. The journey begins with unconstrained consolidation as customers can combine disparate, heterogeneous workloads onto a common platform, maximizing TCO savings. PowerFlex offers a rich out-of-the-box toolset that includes PowerFlex REST API, Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM) and CSI drivers, and PowerFlex Ansible modules, that help streamline operations and boost business agility. Finally, software-driven storage optimization ensures unrestricted IO and throughput performance with submillisecond latency and linear scalability to 1,000s of nodes. Such fundamental differentiators continue to allow customers to optimize their outcomes, whether modernizing a highperformance database or consolidating large application landscapes.

Modernize without limits

PowerFlex is a powerful software-defined infrastructure platform for customers at any stage of their modernization journey. It unifies the delivery of block and file storage, and compute resources in an engineered integrated system while supporting a wide range of operating environments on a common platform. It supports multiple container management and hyperscaler environments while simplifying workload and infrastructure coordination across your on-premises and cloud assets. PowerFlex also offers NVMe/TCP connectivity, giving customers an option to utilize industry standards. These capabilities empower organizations to optimally consolidate a diverse set of workloads with varying requirements and operating environments and drive transformational TCO savings.

Automate for agility

PowerFlex is engineered to streamline operations and boost agility with intelligent software-driven automation. PowerFlex Manager, a unified management toolset for PowerFlex systems, simplifies IT Operations Management (ITOM) and Life Cycle Management (LCM) tasks by providing extensive automation. It enables automated deployments and expansions with minimal hands-on time for the IT team, letting them focus on other strategic initiatives. Further, a rich out-of-the-box toolset including PowerFlex REST API, PowerFlex Ansible modules, and Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM) and CSI drivers enhance DevOps productivity and IT agility. Lastly, Dell CloudIQ intelligent insights simplify monitoring of distributed multi-location PowerFlex deployments by providing a seamless cloudbased AIOps mechanism.

Optimize your outcomes

PowerFlex is designed from the ground up to deliver consistent predictable outcomes at large scales for your most-demanding missioncritical environments. It is optimized for a wide range of validated workload solutions ranging from traditional relational databases and modern cloud-native NoSQL databases to throughput-intensive analytics workloads.

The architecture delivers massive performance for I/O and throughput-intensive workloads by aggregating resources across many nodes while optimizing data path and placement to deliver the best outcomes. Mission-critical applications running on PowerFlex deliver millions of IOPs at sub-millisecond latency without requiring massive infrastructure build-out, scale the performance linearly to 1,000s of nodes and ensure 99.9999% availability with real-life workloads. Additionally, the software-driven approach provides adaptability, enabling customers to quickly scale their infrastructure to address specific resource bottlenecks and reconstruct and recompose their resource pools to address changing seasonal or long-term requirements.

Features:

PowerFlex Software-Defined Infrastructure

PowerFlex is an unbounded software-defined infrastructure that maximizes IT ecosystem flexibility. It provides a solid foundation for the customers for their IT infrastructure modernization journey. Capabilities such as unified block and file storage, and broad OS, hypervisor, platform support flexibility help consolidates disparate, heterogeneous workloads onto a common platform. Additionally, PowerFlex is designed to automate for agility with a unified management toolset, PowerFlex Manager, that simplifies IT operations and lifecycle management with extensive automation capabilities. Finally, software-driven storage optimization ensures extreme workload results, delivers linear scalability, and enables extreme consolidation without performance degradation, allowing customers to optimize their outcomes and meet extreme SLAs.

Modernize without limits

PowerFlex offers extreme flexibility to meet the diverse and rapidly evolving needs of modern enterprises. It offers unprecedented choice for customers to architect their mission-critical IT environments. Mix and match storage, compute and HCI nodes in a dynamic deployment, allowing users to scale storage and compute resources together or independently, one node at a time, as needs dictate.

The platform can also support a broad range of operating environments – bare metal operating systems, hypervisors as well as container platforms – simultaneously with a unified infrastructure platform and management. By allowing you to flexibly mix these architectures in a single deployment, PowerFlex enables you to deploy, scale, and evolve all your applications to meet your business objectives.

Automate for Agility

PowerFlex is engineered to streamline operations and boost agility with intelligent software-driven automation. PowerFlex Manager, a unified management toolset for PowerFlex systems, simplifies IT Operations and lifecycle management tasks by providing extensive automation that reduces administrative time. Further, a rich out-of-the-box toolset including PowerFlex REST API, PowerFlex Ansible modules, and Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM) and CSI drivers enhance DevOps productivity and IT agility. Lastly, with CloudIQ, PowerFlex leverages an AI/ML-based approach to infrastructure monitoring and management, ensuring simplicity and consistency at scale.

Consistent Predictable Outcomes

PowerFlex is designed from the ground up to leverage industry standards and software-driven infrastructure optimization. The architecture delivers massive performance for I/O and throughput-intensive workloads by aggregating resources across many nodes while optimizing data path and placement to deliver the best outcomes. Mission-critical applications running on PowerFlex deliver millions of IOPs at sub-millisecond latency, scale linearly and ensure 99.9999% availability with real-life workloads. Additionally, the software-driven approach provides adaptability, enabling customers to quickly scale their infrastructure to address specific resource bottlenecks and reconstruct and recompose their resource pools to address changing seasonal or long-term requirements.

Flexible Deployment Topologies

PowerFlex’s extreme flexibility meets the diverse and rapidly evolving needs of modern enterprises, offering unprecedented choice for customers to architect their mission-critical IT environments. Mix and match storage, compute, and HCI nodes in a dynamic deployment, scaling storage and compute resources together or independently, one node at a time, as needs dictate.

The functional character of a node is determined primarily by the installation/presence of software services running on a node. However, PowerFlex nodes are configured and purchased as “storage,” “compute,” or “HCI/hyperconverged” nodes. This reflects the type and quantity of resources in the node, ensuring that resources are suited to the expected usage. For example, storage nodes have less RAM and compute nodes usually have no capacity disks in them.

PowerFlex Consumption Options

With PowerFlex, you have choice and flexibility in how you choose to consume the PowerFlex architecture:

• PowerFlex rack is a fully engineered system with integrated networking. It is designed to simplify deployment and accelerate time to value.
• PowerFlex appliance is a flexible solution with a small starting point and massive scale potential. PowerFlex appliance provides a broad choice of supported networking with either full or partial network automation.
• PowerFlex custom nodes have the same performance and scale potential but leave the network management and hardware life-cycling up to the user.
• Public cloud – powering APEX Block Storage. This is a supported software-only deployment of the softwaredefined storage layer on recommended compute instances (with attached storage) in Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Only the MG data layout and “independent (2-layer)” block architectures are supported. Fault Sets may be used to distribute the cluster across multiple Availability Zones, thereby improving resiliency even to disruptions with an AZ. Native asynchronous replication may be used to migrate data between cloud and onpremises PowerFlex systems, or to establish cloud-based BC/DR data protection schemes.

PowerFlex is also available with OpEx-based consumption options with APEX Custom Solutions. Customers can choose between APEX Flex on Demand and APEX Datacenter Utility based on their unique requirements.

Technical Specifications:

	PowerFlex R660	PowerFlex R760	PowerFlex R6625	PowerFlex R7625
Compute, Storage and Memory (per Node)
Chassis	1 RU	2 RU	1 RU	2 RU
CPU	4th Gen Intel Xeon		4th Gen AMD EPIC
CPU sockets	Two	Two	Two	Two
CPU cores (total)	16 - 112	16 - 112	32 - 192	32 - 192
CPU frequency	1.8 GHz - 3.7 GHz	1.8 GHz - 3.7 GHz	2.20 GHz – 4.15 GHz	2.20 GHz – 4.15 GHz
RAM	256GB - 4TB RDIMM	256GB - 4TB RDIMM	256GB - 4TB RDIMM	256GB - 4TB RDIMM
All flash storage capacity	76TB SAS 154TB* NVMe	154TB* SAS 154TB* NVMe	Diskless	Diskless
Drive bays	10 x 2.5”	24 x 2.5”	Diskless	Diskless
NVDIMM + RDIMM Support	Yes	Yes	No	No
Boot/OS solution	480GB (RAID1) “BOSS-N1”
Nvidia GPU Options	A2, L4	H100, A100, A40, A30, A16, A2, L40, L4	A2, L4	H100, A100, A40, A30, A16, A2, L40, L4
Network connectivity (standard 4x25Gb)	Nvidia ConnectX-6 OCP and PCIe Broadcom 57414 OCP and PCIe
Management port	iDRAC 9 Out of Band Management
Selected OS/Hypervisor Support
Storage Data Client	ESXi 6.7, ESXi-7.0 ESXi 7.0 Update 3f (minimum for NVMe/TCP) Windows Server 2016, 2019, 2022 + Hyper-V XenServer 7.x CU2 LTSR Citrix Hypervisor 8.x RHEL 7.9, 8.4, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 CentOS 7.9, CentOS Stream 8.x, Stream 9.x SLES 12 SP5, 15 SP3, 15 SP4, 15 SP5 Oracle Linux 7.9, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 – with RH or UEK Kernels (+ KVM) IBM AIX 7.2 TL5, IBM AIX 7.3 TL0 Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS and earlier Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS and earlier RHEL CoreOS (when using PowerFlex SDC container for CSI driver)
Storage Data Server	ESXi 6.7 and 7.0** (only with PowerFlex Manager – rack and appliance) RHEL 7.9, 8.4, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 CentOS 7.9, CentOS Stream 8.x, Stream 9.x SLES 12 SP5, 15 SP3, 15 SP4, 15 SP5 PowerFlex EmbeddedOS (Linux)** Oracle Linux 7.9, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 – with RH or UEK Kernels (+ KVM) Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS and earlier Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS and earlier
PowerFlex Clustering, Scaling and Management
Min Nodes Per Cluster (Two-Layer Configuration)	4 Storage Only nodes minimum (6 or more recommended), 1 to 3 Compute Only nodes (depending on host OS)
Min Nodes Per Cluster (HCI Configuration)	4 HCI Nodes minimum (6 or more recommended)
Scaling Increments	1 Node (HCI, Compute Only or Storage Only)1
PowerFlex Manager Management Node Requirements2	JEmbeddedOS Jump Server: 16GB RAM, 4 vCPU, 500GB storage Secure Connect Gateway: 4GB RAM, 2 vCPU, 16GB storage PowerFlex Management VMs (3x): 32GB RAM, 16 vCPU, 650GB storage (each) PowerFlex Enterprise Encryption and KeyStore (optional): 6GB RAM, 4 vCPU, 64GB storage (These are all supplied as virtual machines)
PowerFlex Manager Supported Switches
Management Switches3	Cisco Nexus 3172TQ, Cisco Nexus 31108TC-V, Cisco Nexus 92348GC-X, Dell S4148T-ON
Access or Leaf Switches	Cisco Nexus 3132QX, Cisco Nexus 3164Q, Cisco Nexus 93180YC-EX, Cisco Nexus 93180YC-FX, Cisco Nexus 93240YC-FX2, Cisco Nexus N93360YC-FX2, Dell S5048F-ON, Dell S5248F-ON, Dell S5296F-ON4, Dell S5224F-ON‡ , Dell S4148F-ON4
Aggregation or Spine Switches	Cisco Nexus 9236C, Cisco Nexus 9336C-FX2, Cisco Nexus 9364C-GX, Cisco Nexus 9364C-GX, Dell S5232F-ON
Power and Dimensions	PowerFlex R660	PowerFlex R760	PowerFlex R6625	PowerFlex R7625
Fully redundant power supplies	700 W Titanium 800 W Platinum 1100 W Titanium 1400 W Platinum 1800 W Titanium	700 W Titanium 800 W Platinum 1400 W Platinum 1800 W Titanium 2400 W Platinum 2800 W Titanium	700 W Titanium 800 W Platinum 1100 W Titanium 1400 W Platinum 1800 W Titanium	700 W Titanium 800 W Platinum 1400 W Platinum 1800 W Titanium 2400 W Platinum 2800 W Titanium
Redundant cooling fans	8	6	8	6
Physical dimensions	H: 42.8mm W: 434.0mm D: 823 mm Wgt: 21.2 kg	H: 86.8mm W: 434mm D: 772 mm Wgt: 35.3 kg	H: 42.8mm W: 434.0mm D: 751 mm Wgt: 21.2 kg	H: 86.8mm W: 434mm D: 700 mm Wgt: 24.6 kg
Environmental and Certifications
Ambient operating temperature	10°C to 35°C 50°F to 95°F	10°C to 35°C 50°F to 95°F	10°C to 35°C 50°F to 95°F	10°C to 35°C 50°F to 95°F
Storage temperature range	40°C to +65°C -40°F to +149°F	40°C to +65°C -40°F to +149°F	40°C to +65°C -40°F to +149°F	40°C to +65°C -40°F to +149°F
Operating relative humidity	8% to 80% (non-condensing)	8% to 80% (non-condensing)	8% to 80% (non-condensing)	8% to 80% (non-condensing)
Operating altitude with no deratings	3048m approx. 10,000 ft	3048m approx. 10,000 ft	3048m approx. 10,000 ft	3048m approx. 10,000 ft

* PowerFlex version 4 or greater required for 154TB, otherwise maximum is 128TB
** Only ESXi 7 and the PowerFlex EmbeddedOS are fully managed and life-cycled by PowerFlex Manage
¹ A single node is the minimum scaling required to expand an existing Storage Pool. Creation of a net new Storage Pool requires the addition of a minimum of 3 Storage or HCI Nodes.
² New PowerFlex appliance deployments include a single-node management controller (with an option for three-node for larger systems). New PowerFlex integrated rack deployments include a three-node management controller. Both PowerFlex Management Controller options are ESXi based.
³ For PowerFlex appliance, the management switch can be “bring your own”.
⁴ PowerFlex appliance only

Solutions & Services:

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Documentation:

Dell EMC PowerFlex Datasheet (.PDF)

Dell EMC PowerFlex Spec Sheet (.PDF)